But innovations in a particular intimately connected with civil liberty will ever be guarded against in a free country, with all the vigilance of jealous circumspection. Men will often patiently support the present evil, the nature and extent of which is ascertained by experience, rather than incur the hazard of a future detriment, which may possibly outweigh the beneficial ends proposed. If then the unrestrained use of the Press is, as it has been commonly termed, the palladium of liberty, may it never be taken from us by fraud or force; and perhaps the evils resulting from the abuse of this privilege are of that kind which, when permitted to take their course, ultimately remedy themselves: for it is certain, that there may be a period, and perhaps our own times approach to it, when the petulant licentiousness of public prints and pamphlets becomes too contemptible to gain attention, and therefore fails of producing a malignant effect. Avarice will cease to publish, when men are too wise to purchase; faction and vanity will be silent, when they no longer find an audience: but penal and coercive measures are known to give weight to the nonsense of sedition and impiety, by alarming that attention which it could not otherwise excite, and to occasion the evils intended to be obviated; as the means used to extinguish a flame sometimes increase its violence.

But referring the discussion of this complicated subject to legislative wisdom, we may venture to express an honest wish without danger of presumption; and surely all the good and enlightened part of mankind will sympathize in the desire, That the time may not be distant, when the qualities of the heart shall be cultivated with the same general ardour as the powers of the understanding; when the affectation of singularity, and the love of money, shall no longer multiply treatises tending to teach

or a factious conduct; when the Art of Printing shall no more be perverted to embellish vice and justify folly; but, operating in the accomplishment of its proper purposes, at once promote the interest, which cannot indeed without natural violence be separate, of sound learning and unaffected virtue.

No. CXXXIX.

Cursory Thoughts on Satire and Satirists.

THE good reception which that species of poetry called Satire has commonly met with in the world is perhaps owing to some dispositions in the human nature not the most amiable. It derives not its power of pleasing, like other poetry, from its effects on the imagination. It raises no enchanting prospects; it is not necessarily employed in fiction. A spirit of indignation is its essential principle, and by causing a similar spirit in the reader, it gently gratifies the irascible passions.

It must be owned, that it has seldom answered its ostensible end of reforming the age. Yet allowing it to be of little use in reformation, it is often composed with such evident marks of genius as render it interesting to men of taste. And though spleen may have given rise to its first production, and the love of censure ensured its success, yet the beauties of the composition will cause it to be read, even by those who disapprove personal invective, long after the resentment that occasioned it has subsided.

Horace, the politest writer whom the world ever produced, adopted satirical writing, and succeeded in it, though there is every reason to believe that

is, he was a man of the world, as. well as a man of reflection, and wrote his remarks on men and things in careless verse; not without cepsuring them indeed, but without indulging the asperity of sarcasm. He probed every wound with so gentle a hand, that the patient smiled under the operation. The gay friend of Mæcenas had lived in courts, and knew too much of the world to think he could reform the and voluptuous part of it by abrupt severity.

Not so the stern Juvenal. With all the warmth of a zealot in the cause of virtue, he pours his majestic verse, and amid the most spirited invective and the finest morality, emits many a luminous irradiation of poetry beautifully descriptive.

His predecessor Persius had afforded him a noble model. He improved on it in nothing but perspicuity. Persius is all fire, spirit, animation. The frequency of his interrogations rouses the attention of the reader, and it is not easy to read and understand him without catching the glow with which he evidently wrote. If his obscurity arose from fear, it does not indeed depreciate his merit as a writer; but it has caused him to be less read and admired than he deserves. The last lines of his second satire are alone sufficient to entitle him to immortality.

The English seem to have copied the manner of Juvenal rather than of Horace. Our national spirit is indeed of the manly and rougher kind, and feels something congenial with itself in the vehemence of the sullen Juvenal.

The Roman is remarkably harmonious. But Donne, his imitator, seems to have thought roughness of verse, as well as of sentiment, a real grace. It is scarcely possible, that a writer, who did not studiously avoid a smooth versification, could have written so many lines without stumbling on a good one. Pope has revived his fame by attuning his

harsh numbers; a work whose very excellence makes us regret that a genius so fertile as was the bard's of Twickenham, should have wasted its vigour in paraphrases and translations.

This versatile poet has imbibed the very spirit of Horace. Nor can the mere English reader obtain, by the translations of Creech or of Francis, so clear and adequate an idea of the true Horatian manner, as from the liberal imitations of Pope.

Dryden seems to have preferred the model of his favourite Juvenal. His nervous line was well adapted to satirical composition. He says himself, "he could write severely, with more ease than he could write gently." His Absalom and Achitopel, and his Mac Flecknoe, are masterpieces and models in the serious and vehement kind of satire.

Boileau seems to have blended with judgment the manner of Horace and Juvenal. Yet whatever degree of elegance he possesses, the natural monotony of French verse tires an ear accustomed to the various harmony of our English poets. The French language never appears so mean as in the heroic couplet. He who reads the Henriade, and at the same time thinks of Milton, Dryden, Garth, or Pope, must close the volume with all the loathing of disgust. He who reads Boileau, will find his improving imitator Pope rise in his opinion. Pope rouses the attention by all the changes of musical modulation; Boileau sooths it to dull repose by the lullaby of similar pauses uniformly repeated.

A poet of our own, little attended to at present, once enjoyed a very high degree of fame as a satirical writer. Oldham has been called the English Juvenal. His satire on the Jesuits has indeed much of the spirit of Juvenal. It displays wit, force, pungency, and a very copious invention; but it is

prevent Oldham from keeping his place among the classics of our country. He has lashed the Jesuits with deserved and unrelenting rigour; but though severe punishment is often necessary, yet to see it inflicted with the wanton cruelty of an assassin, is not agreeable. There are some works of poetry as well as of painting, which, though well performed as pieces of art, lose the praise their excellence demands, by the shocking nature of their repre

sentations.

A later satirist, Dr. Young, is still read with pleasure. But he has the fault of Seneca, of Ovid, of Cowley; a profuse and unseasonable application of wit. His satires have been justly called a string of epigrams. A lover of originality, he did not regard models. Had he endeavoured to imitate Juvenal or Persius, he would have avoided this fault. Those great masters were too much engrossed by the importance of their subjects to fall into the puerility of witticism. There is also something in Young's versification which a good ear does not approve.

But even Young, popular as he was, has been eclipsed by a poet who has shone with the effulgence and the instability of a meteor. Churchill possessed merit; a merit which was magnified when seen through the medium of party, beyond that degree which it was able to support. When reason at last viewed what passion had exaggerated, she was disgusted with the disappointment, and turned away with neglect. Thus the celebrated Churchill, with whose applause the town reechoed, is sinking to an oblivion which he hardly deserves; for though he wrote many careless lines and many dull passages, yet the greater part of his productions displayed a genuine vein of satirical genius.

Within a few years Satire has reassumed her